Our deprecation process doesn't help anyone working on top of Parrot apart from keeping us from changing things too often. Drupal does a much better job of making their changes known: http://drupal.org/update/modules .

PAST::Pattern is now at the point where I can implement optimizations using it fairly simply. I'd like to know if anyone has any suggestions for possible low-hanging-fruit optimizations to work on? Which isn't technically a question, actually.

Anything which involves looking for trees with attributes or children with certain properties is trivial. More complicated things can be done with a little more effort(anything is technically possible, but not necessarily convenient, since you can use a closure as a pattern).

(not so much a question as a comment coming from kid51's notes at http://thenceforward.net/parrot/yapc_bof_20100621.txt:) IMO lexicals/scope is another critical weakness that should be addressed as urgently as objects and metamodel, as great gains and synergy can come of it.